Terms of Service

1. What ChessScribe does

ChessScribe converts photographs of handwritten or printed chess scoresheets into PGN files. It reads the notation, replays every move on a chess board, repairs readings that are not legal, flags the ones it is unsure about, and saves the result to your library where you can edit, analyse, export and optionally share it.

Some features depend on your plan. We may add, change or withdraw features, and we will give reasonable notice before removing something you rely on.

2. Who may use ChessScribe

You may open an account if you are 13 or older. If you are between 13 and 18, you may use ChessScribe only with the knowledge and guidance of a parent or legal guardian.

Children under 13 are welcome to use ChessScribe to review their own games, but only through an account held and supervised by a parent or guardian. The account holder must be an adult, and that adult is responsible for everything done through the account.

Coaches, clubs and schools may use one account for a group only where an adult supervises it and each child's parent or guardian has agreed. Do not upload a child's personal details beyond what a scoresheet already contains.

3. Transcription and analysis can be wrong

The reader marks moves it is unsure about so you can review them, but an unflagged move is not a guarantee of correctness: a misreading that happens to be legal and consistent with the moves around it can pass without a flag.

In particular, ChessScribe output must not be treated as an authoritative record for:

• settling a disputed game, claim or result
• an appeal to an arbiter, tournament director or federation
• rating submissions or any other official filing
• anything else where being wrong has consequences for someone

The original scoresheet remains the record of the game. Coaching commentary, engine scores, opening names, motif labels and improvement suggestions are informational only and are not chess instruction you should follow uncritically.

We work continuously on accuracy, and reporting a bad conversion genuinely helps — send it to us and, where you are willing to share the image, we will use it to improve the reader.

4. Your account and keeping it secure

You sign in with a one-time code sent to your email address. That code, and the email account it arrives in, are what protect your library. You are responsible for keeping both under your control.

• Do not share sign-in codes with anyone, including anyone claiming to be from ChessScribe. We will never ask you for one.
• Do not let another person use your account, except a child you supervise as described above.
• Keep the email address on the account current, and secure it with a strong password and two-factor authentication.
• Tell us at security@chessscribe.ai as soon as you suspect someone else has reached your account.

We may suspend an account immediately, without notice, where we reasonably believe it has been compromised or is being used to attack the service or other users.

5. Your games stay yours

The scoresheet photographs you upload, the games produced from them, and the notes you write remain yours. We claim no ownership of them.

You give us the permission we need to run the service: to store your images and games, to send an image to our transcription provider so it can be read, to display your library back to you, and to serve a game to anyone you deliberately share it with. That permission ends when you delete the content or your account, except for backups that age out on the schedule described in the Privacy Policy.

We do not sell your content, use it for advertising, or publish it. If you tell us you are happy for a specific image to help improve the reader, we will use it for that; otherwise we will not.

Only upload scoresheets you are entitled to upload. For a game you played, that is straightforward. For someone else's game — a scoresheet you were given, or a photo taken at a tournament — make sure you have their agreement, and a parent's agreement where the player is a child.

6. Public share links

Sharing is off by default. When you turn it on for a game, we create a link containing a random, unguessable identifier. Anyone holding that link can view that game, including player names and any notes you wrote on it, without signing in.

A share link is public in effect: it can be forwarded, posted or indexed by anything that receives it. Turning sharing off revokes the link, though copies already saved or cached elsewhere are outside our control. Think before sharing a game that names a child.

7. Acceptable use

Do not use ChessScribe to:

• upload anything unlawful, abusive, or that infringes someone else's rights
• upload images of people that you have no right to upload, or that contain personal data unrelated to a chess game
• impersonate another player, coach or organiser, or submit tournament listings you are not authorised to submit
• resell, sublicense or white-label the service without our written agreement
• misrepresent ChessScribe output as an official or verified record

8. Security: what you must not do

This service holds other people's games and, in many cases, children's names. Attacks on it are attacks on them. The following are prohibited without exception, and each is an independent ground for immediate termination:

• accessing, or attempting to access, any account, library, game or file that is not yours — including by guessing or enumerating share links, user identifiers or storage paths
• probing, scanning or testing the security of the service or its infrastructure, including automated vulnerability scanning, fuzzing or brute-force attempts against sign-in codes
• circumventing or interfering with authentication, authorisation, rate limits, plan limits, usage counters or any other control, including by tampering with requests, tokens or client code
• uploading or transmitting malware, or any file crafted to exploit the service, our providers, or another user's device
• extracting data at scale, whether by scraping, automated download, or any other means not offered through the interface
• interfering with availability — denial of service, flooding, or deliberately expensive requests
• reverse engineering, decompiling or attempting to derive source code or model behaviour, except to the extent that applicable law expressly permits it
• using the service to attack a third party, or to store or distribute material obtained through a breach elsewhere

You must not test any of the above even out of curiosity or to prove a point. Where conduct appears criminal we will preserve the relevant logs and may report it.

9. Security: what we do, and what we cannot promise

We take security seriously and apply measures proportionate to the data we hold. These are described in the Privacy Policy and include encrypted transport, per-user access rules enforced by the database, private storage for scoresheet images, and authenticated server calls.

If a breach affects your personal data, we will investigate, act to contain it, and notify you and any regulator we are required to notify, within the time limits that apply to us. We will tell you what we know, what we do not yet know, and what you should do.

If you find a vulnerability, report it privately to security@chessscribe.ai and give us a reasonable chance to fix it before telling anyone else. We will not pursue a good-faith reporter who stays within the report — that means no accessing other people's data, no service degradation, and no extraction of data beyond the minimum needed to demonstrate the issue.

10. Plans, limits and payment

Each plan includes a monthly allowance of conversions and a set of features. Allowances reset at the start of each calendar month, are counted per account, and do not roll over. We enforce them on the server; attempting to work around them breaches section 8.

Paid plans are not currently charged. Checkout is still in development, and any plan you select today is activated without payment. When billing goes live we will present the price, billing period and cancellation terms before you are asked to pay, and we will not charge an existing account without your explicit agreement.

We may change plan pricing or contents with reasonable notice. If a change disadvantages you materially, you may cancel.

11. Services we depend on

ChessScribe runs on third-party infrastructure — hosting, database and authentication, and an AI provider that performs the transcription. Those providers process your data on our instructions, and are listed in the Privacy Policy. An outage or fault at a provider can affect ChessScribe, and we are not liable for their acts beyond our own responsibility for choosing and instructing them.

Where you export a PGN into another site or app, that service's own terms and privacy policy apply to what happens next.

12. Our intellectual property

ChessScribe's software, interface, brand, lesson content and blog articles belong to us or our licensors. You may use them only as part of using the service. Chess positions, openings, the rules of chess and the games themselves are not ours and we claim nothing over them.

13. Availability, suspension and ending the agreement

We aim to keep ChessScribe available but do not promise uninterrupted service. We may suspend it for maintenance, or to protect users and the service.

You may stop using ChessScribe at any time, delete individual games from your library, and ask us at privacy@chessscribe.ai to delete your account entirely. We may end or suspend your access if you breach these terms, if we are required to, or if we discontinue the service — in which case we will give you reasonable notice and a chance to export your games.

Deleting your account removes your games, images and profile as described in the Privacy Policy. Export anything you want to keep first.

14. Disclaimers

Except where the law says otherwise, ChessScribe is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy or non-infringement.

We specifically do not warrant that transcription or analysis will be accurate or complete, that the service will be uninterrupted or error free, or that defects will be corrected.

15. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, loss of profit, loss of opportunity, or loss of data beyond the cost of restoring it from your own copies. This includes any loss arising from an inaccurate transcription or analysis, or from a result, appeal or rating decision that went against you.

Where we are liable, our total liability for all claims in any twelve-month period is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in that period and one hundred units of your local currency.

Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded — including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for rights you have as a consumer.

16. Indemnity

You agree to cover our reasonable losses arising from your breach of these terms, from content you upload that you had no right to upload, or from your misuse of the service. This does not apply to a consumer acting outside a business, where local law says otherwise.

17. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of «country or state», and its courts have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer, you keep the protection of the mandatory laws of the country you live in, and may bring a claim there.

Before starting a formal dispute, please contact us at support@chessscribe.ai — nearly everything is resolvable that way.

18. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. When a change is material we will notify you in the app or by email before it takes effect, and the date at the top of this page always shows the current version. Continuing to use ChessScribe after a change means you accept it; if you do not, you can stop using the service and delete your account.

19. Contact

«legal entity name» — general enquiries support@chessscribe.ai, privacy privacy@chessscribe.ai, security security@chessscribe.ai.